A motor vehicle door latch mechanism of the embodiment described above and disclosed in DE 20 2008 010 423 U1 is designed in such a way that the two switch states of the sensor belong to different current paths of a cable network. Essentially, two current paths are provided between which the sensor switches. In this way, the position of a rotary latch can, for instance, be determined with the aid of an On/Off switch, functioning as a sensor. Such an arrangement has generally proven to be successful.
Furthermore DE 42 13 131 A1 discloses a redundant switch arrangement containing two redundant parallel electric lines. Each line contains one switch consisting at least of one contact pair in each of the two lines. A monitoring unit including a fault detection device is arranged downstream of the double switch. The monitoring unit checks the electrical switch states of the contact pairs. In this way a switch arrangement with active redundancy is equipped with diagnostics capability. Diagnostics capability means that, for instance, intermediate states of one or two switches can be reliably determined.
Practical applications increasingly require for a signal of a sensor to be transferred from the connected control unit to another control unit. This requires an adaptation of the two control units during data exchange, which can often only be achieved with complex technical controls. The invention aims to remedy this situation.